The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War

Century

Introduction

THERE WERE FEW REASONS FOR OPTIMISM in Germany in the summer of 1948. Three years after the most destructive war in history, German cities still lay in ruins, dislocated refugees and wounded ex-soldiers wandered the streets, and widespread hunger sparked unrest and protest. Although Marshall Plan aid had begun to arrive from across the Atlantic, most Germans expected long years of poverty and desolation. To make matters worse, it was becoming evident that the emerging Cold War would cast a dark shadow over Germany’s future. As the world’s new superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—transitioned from wartime alliance to postwar hostility, both were determined to fasten their grip on Germany, even at the price of the defeated nation’s division. In June 1948 the world held its breath as Germany drew ever closer to military conflict. After Soviet troops placed Berlin’s western sectors under military blockade, American and British planes dropped supplies into the besieged city, marking the end of superpower negotiations. The blockade would end nine months later, but it firmly demonstrated that the Americans and Soviets would be unable to overcome their mutual mistrust. The specter of Germany’s division into two separate states loomed large. After the devastation and humiliating defeat of the Third Reich, the century-old dream of a united Germany now lay in tatters.

Yet Carl J. Friedrich (1901–1984), chief legal adviser to General Lucius Clay, the U.S. military governor of Germany, was strikingly cheerful. In August 1948, two months after the start of the Berlin blockade, Friedrich happily reported to Clay that his mission to restructure Germany’s western occupation zones into a decentralized, democratic, and peaceful West German republic was coming to a successful conclusion. Having supervised countless meetings of German legal scholars, elected local politicians, and Allied occupation personnel on Clay’s behalf, Friedrich had helped complete drafts of democratic constitutions at the regional and national level. The German parliaments that the U.S. and British authorities created in their occupation zones would soon ratify these constitutions, turning them into West Germany’s foundational legal contracts for the remainder of the century. Friedrich was also energetically engaged in constructing new educational programs designed to train Germans in democratic thought. With the assistance of Rockefeller Foundation officials and U.S. diplomats, he helped found a new university in West Berlin, developed a new democratic research center in Heidelberg, and drafted new curricula that would soon be embraced by universities across Germany. For Friedrich, the impending tragedy of Germany’s Cold War division was marginal compared to the exhilarating prospect of democratization. The creation of a democratic West German state out of the rubble of Nazism and war was a source of great promise and optimism.

Friedrich’s faith in Germany’s radical transformation was not merely the product of enormous personal ambitions. His confidence also stemmed from decades of intimate links to the United States. Although he was born in Germany, Friedrich spent the 1930s and 1940s as an émigré scholar in Harvard University’s Department of Government, where he cultivated extensive connections to U.S. academic leaders, politicians, military leaders, and philanthropists. The graduate programs, research centers, and training institutions that he founded, such as Harvard’s School of Overseas Administration, educated thousands of future policymakers and military personnel for postwar careers and, more broadly, American global hegemony. Friedrich’s prominence increased further after the end of Germany’s occupation in 1949, when he became a renowned anti-Communist intellectual in both the United States and West Germany. His flurry of writings, which warned against the evils of global communism and called for a firm German-American alliance, electrified the minds of many readers and inspired intellectuals and politicians such as David Riesman, Hannah Arendt, and Henry Kissinger. Alongside his role as an agent of German democratization, Friedrich was also a major figure of Cold War thought and international politics.

To many of Friedrich’s contemporaries, these two campaigns—democratizing Germany and forging an anti-Communist international alliance—were a response to the miseries of World War II and the dreadful threat of Soviet power. For Friedrich, however, these efforts marked the resurrection of older ideas and networks formed as a young German political theorist during the Weimar period (1918–1933). Years before the National Socialists’ rise to power, Friedrich developed an idiosyncratic theory of democracy and international cooperation. Democracy, Friedrich wrote, emerged not from the Enlightenment but from seventeenth-century German Protestant political thought. Democracy therefore had authentically German roots, which Germans had to embrace. Friedrich further maintained that Protestantism and democracy had spread from Germany to the United States with the Puritan migration. Germans and Americans thus shared natural religious and political foundations. These two nations had to form an international, Protestant, and democratic alliance, one that would help ensure the survival of democracy in Europe. Throughout the Weimar era, Friedrich sought to spearhead the creation of this alliance through the drafting of a pro-democratic curriculum and German-American educational and cultural exchange programs. Blazing a trail he would walk twenty years later, he convinced American philanthropists and policymakers to support these programs. For Friedrich, then, the post-Nazi world did not require new ideas. The democratic theories, networks, and institutions that he had first developed in the 1920s would serve as the recipe for German democracy and international stability after World War II.

In this blend of distinctive intellectual visions from the Weimar era, bold aspirations for democratic reform, and service with the U.S. political establishment, Friedrich was not alone. Countless German émigré thinkers drew on ideas first formed in Germany’s interwar ferment to participate in both Germany’s reconstruction and the formation of American Cold War hegemony. Among them were Ernst Fraenkel (1898–1975), a Socialist theoretician who served as a senior official in the U.S. occupation of Korea after World War II, participated in Korea’s division, and became one of the most important writers on democracy and labor in West Germany; Waldemar Gurian (1902–1954), a Catholic journalist who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation’s cultural outreach programs to Germans after World War II, coined the anti-Communist theory of totalitarianism, and became one of the foremost specialists on the Soviet Union in the United States; Karl Loewenstein (1891–1973), a liberal lawyer who during the war worked at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he led a campaign of mass incarceration in Latin America, and then became one of the leading pro-democratic and anti-Communist thinkers in postwar Germany; and Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980), whose realist theory of international relations was highly influential among anti-Communist U.S. diplomats. These émigrés hailed from varied religious, political, and intellectual backgrounds. They all pursued a distinctive ideological mission. But in different ways and through diverse institutions, they were all crucial architects of both democratization and anti-Communist mobilization. Their ideas, policies, and institutional connections stood at the heart of the postwar Atlantic order.

The unlikely paths that led these émigrés from Weimar to the center of American power are far more than mere biographical curiosities. They illustrate three crucial intellectual and political trends that helped shape the world after World War II. First, these German émigrés, who spent the dark years of the Third Reich in exile, were vital yet often unrecognized players in Germany’s postwar reconstruction. With support and funding from American authorities, they introduced comprehensive theories of democracy and anti-communism, took part in constitutional and cultural reforms, and founded pro-democratic academic curricula and institutions. By the end of the 1950s, their teachings about the legitimacy of democratic institutions and the need for anti-Communist mobilization had become corner-stones of the new Federal Republic of Germany (or West Germany, as it was colloquially called). Equally important, their conception of democracy, based on strong state institutions, spiritual consensus, and vigilant suppression of Communists, helped delegitimize and exclude alternative political visions. Their ideas marked the harsh limits and brutality of postwar imagination. The stories of German émigrés thus chart the ideological contours of Germany’s postwar political order, both its vibrancy and its constraints. They uncover the forces that facilitated what historian Tony Judt called the most dramatic instance of political stabilization in post-war Europe.¹

Second, the long careers of these émigrés show that the intellectual roots of Germany’s democratization lay not in the postwar era, nor was this dramatic change merely a response to the trauma of Nazism. Rather, these émigrés drew their thinking about politics from their experiences during Germany’s short-lived first democracy, the Weimar Republic, which emerged from the destruction of World War I and ended with the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. Weimar was an era of great democratic promise but also of intense violence and instability. Its rocky years generated passionate intellectual debates about the nature of democratic politics. As young men, the future émigrés took part in these debates. They spawned a stream of innovative theories about the nature of democratic institutions, democracy’s relationship to welfare and religion, and necessary responses to anti-democratic political forces. They ambitiously argued that democracy was the sole legitimate regime, one that had the right to violently crush its enemies. Decades later, as they participated in Germany’s rebuilding, they reached back to these ideas and plans. They resurrected older thought patterns, educational institutions, and political rhetoric. Weimar was thus far more than a cautionary tale of democratic collapse. When Germans once again sought to build democracy after the trauma of World War II, Weimar provided powerful intellectual models for political reconstruction.

Third, and least recognized by scholars, the stories of Friedrich, Fraenkel, Gurian, Loewenstein, and Morgenthau shed light on the nature of U.S. power and policymaking during World War II and the early Cold War. Their careers exemplify how the rising American leviathan absorbed European political thought and helped disseminate it around the world. As the global conflicts with Nazism, Japanese militarism, and then communism evolved, German émigrés accompanied the U.S. military, State Department, and private American organizations to unexpected locations. They became political advisers in Korea, legal reformers in Latin America, officials in philanthropic foundations in the Rhineland, and consultants at the State Department in Washington, D.C. Equally important, their writings and theories provided some of the most influential intellectual frameworks that mobilized American democracy for a crusade against communism. In an avalanche of journals, books, and lectures, these five émigrés framed Communist regimes as evil, violent, and ever-expanding tyrannies and explained how democratic states could defeat and destroy them. Though these ideas ostensibly celebrated democratic principles, they often led to ironic, tragic, and brutal consequences. As the following pages show, the emigrés’ conceptions of democracy often ironically led to repression. Yet for these individuals, the democratization of Germany and the defeat of global communism were inseparable campaigns that informed and fueled each other. By taking part in both, they combined two major transformations of the postwar era—Germany’s reconstruction and the emerging Cold War—into a single international structure.

The intellectual foundations laid in Weimar were thus fundamental to the architecture of postwar politics in both West Germany and the United States and to the Cold War alliance between them. The ideas originally crafted to support the fragile Weimar Republic helped facilitate Germany’s turn to democracy as well as German and American mobilization to combat communism. Each chapter of this book focuses on an individual from a particular background and the political theory he developed in Weimar Germany; his integration into wartime American political, intellectual, and diplomatic networks; and his participation in recruiting institutions and populations to aid in the creation of a democratic Western alliance. Each offers a window onto broad intellectual and political currents within West Germany and the United States during the postwar era. Together, these stories uncover the ideas, ironies, organizations, and experiences that shaped the early Cold War on both sides of the Atlantic. They explain the intellectual origins of titanic political projects.

THE MIRACLE OF GERMANY’S RECONSTRUCTION

The rapid and colossal transformation of postwar Germany, from racist dictatorship to liberal democracy, was one of the most exceptional sagas of the modern era. Having fought for the Nazi regime with ferocity throughout the war, even in the face of impending defeat, Germans performed a volte-face and, within just a few years, embraced democracy. With astonishing speed, this previously polarized and violent society developed democratic institutions, electoral organs, the rule of law, vibrant democratic norms, and an active participatory public. This transformation was especially astounding given the deep penetration of Nazism into German society. Hitler and his followers had not merely controlled state institutions (as all dictatorships do) but had also aggressively Nazified and supervised Germany’s school curricula, cultural institutions, largest corporations, and voluntary associations, from book clubs to hiking groups. Germany’s shift to democracy has thus continued to stir the minds of political leaders, theorists, and reformers. When the American authorities planned the occupation of Iraq in 2003, for example, specialists studiously consulted the literature on the occupations of Germany and Japan. In the eyes of many, Germany’s political reconstruction in the aftermath of 1945 remains one of the greatest miracles of the twentieth century.²

What explains this rapid change? What accounts for the speed with which Germans of diverse political and religious backgrounds came not only to tolerate democratic institutions but to embrace democratic norms of open debate and peaceful competition as the key legitimate political standard? The many historians who have sought to answer these questions generally embrace one of two perspectives. The most common interpretation focuses on the decisive role of the United States. First, during the occupation of Germany (1945–1949), and later as part of the Cold War, the new superpower heavily invested in the reconstruction of Germany’s political institutions, economy, and educational system as part of a frenzied effort to secure Europe from the threat of Soviet dominance. From 1945 on, an army of American educators, labor unionists, businessmen, and philanthropists rushed to join the project of restructuring the ruined country. For over a decade, with massive financial, logistical, and political support from the U.S. government, this web of activists founded new educational programs, invested in political education, and flooded the country with pro-democratic, anti-Soviet magazines, books, and radio shows. Many historians maintain that this prolonged and multifaceted campaign profoundly influenced Germany’s transformation into a stable and democratic culture. Its mistakes and setbacks notwithstanding, the United States successfully imposed its own ideas and norms that led Germans to abandon their extreme nationalism and violence and instead embrace peaceful political competition.³

In contrast, a second interpretation of Germany’s transformation sees it primarily as the work of Germans. Despite the scale of their efforts, Americans quickly recognized that they could not single-handedly transform the cultural and intellectual terms by which Germans understood the postwar world. As many frustrated observers have noted, West Germans might have consumed American culture, listened to American radio stations, and flocked to watch American movies, but they just as often condemned what they saw as foreign American culture and values. Indeed, both during and after the occupation, Germans frequently ignored American cultural diplomacy. They even interpreted its content as an affirmation of anti-American sentiments.⁴ Many historians therefore argue that Germans embraced democracy primarily because of postwar domestic conditions and experiences. The defeated nation, they claim, came to value peaceful democratic competition owing to its shame over Nazi crimes, the economic prosperity it enjoyed in the 1950s, or the growth of a new generation after the war. According to this narrative, Germans found their own path to democratic ideas and norms.⁵

Both of these interpretations are helpful in understanding Germany’s dramatic turn. Yet they overlook several crucial factors that played a decisive role in the making of a democratic Germany. First, democratization was not the product of the individual activities of American or German agents. It was the outcome of prolonged collaboration, in which both sides were crucial players. No group embodies this synergy better than the émigrés who returned to postwar Germany. In the decade after 1945, they worked for the U.S. military, diplomatic establishment, foreign aid programs, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations. They established academic centers for the study of democracy in Heidelberg, Berlin, and Munich, conducted public outreach campaigns aimed at workers, and published a stream of democratic theories in books and journals. But despite their dependence on American wealth and might, they did not merely transmit American ideas or values. Rather, they utilized their positions in order to disseminate their own ideas. The complex project of building democracy was the product of symbiosis. It was a process in which consistent American pressure and the efforts of German actors were inseparable.

Second, scholars of Germany’s reconstruction privilege economic and political measures, such as the Marshall Plan, the introduction of the West German currency (D-Mark) in 1948, or the writing of the West German Constitution in 1949. In doing so, they often ignore the role of ideas and democratic theories in shaping action. In fact, scholars have often claimed that Germany’s democratization evolved without any intellectual infrastructure. Mark Lilla echoed a widespread notion when he asserted that Germany’s democratization was a revolution without ideas, a strange rebirth of democracy without democratic thought.⁶ But postwar Germany was shaped by vibrant intellectual debates and theories. As the following pages show, returning German émigrés provided new intellectual frameworks for democratic reform and offered a plethora of political languages and terminologies. They argued that democracy was rooted in older German religious traditions and called on Germans to strengthen democracy against the Communist enemy. These German thinkers took it upon themselves to convince their countrymen that democracy was not a foreign system imposed by the victorious Allies but rather the product of indigenous ideas. In a multifaceted campaign of lectures, publications, and teaching, they sought to demonstrate that German cultural traditions were naturally and organically democratic. In doing so, they helped reshape German political behavior. And as evidence shows, these émigrés’ ideas resonated powerfully among many. The people who read their works, listened to their lectures, or passed through the institutions they helped build explicitly acknowledged their influence. In order to understand how people thought about and understood democracy, one must therefore examine the development and implementation of émigré ideas and theories. They provided a crucial intellectual arsenal for Germany’s democratic transformation.⁷

Finally, historians of Germany’s democratization generally begin their stories in 1945, obscuring longer continuities. They tend to agree that, in the words of one scholar, it was catastrophe that rendered the Germans capable of democracy.⁸ But the political ideas that shaped West Germany were not a product of the postwar world. Rather, this book contends that many of the intellectual foundations of Germany’s democratization, its possibilities and limitations, lay in the intense discussions of the Weimar era. As historian Daniel Rodgers has noted, moments of crisis and upheaval rarely generate new ideas and new policies. When societies experience radical transformation and old hierarchies and institutions collapse, men are much more prone to fall back on inherited and instinctive values in an effort to cope with a totally unprecedented situation.⁹ Despite the cataclysmic effects of total war and devastating defeat, the democratic concepts that replaced Nazism were not simply a response to the trauma of war, although they gained a new appeal in the postwar era. When thinkers sought to democratize Germany, they dipped into an intellectual reservoir developed in the 1920s and the early 1930s, when the country had first experimented with a democratic system. While historians have devoted considerable energy to uncovering continuities between the Third Reich and the postwar Federal Republic, the earlier and more obscure forces that linked the two German republics were equally if not more significant for Germany’s stabilization. Had it not been for the existing ideas and traditions of the Weimar era, Germans would not have quickly embraced democracy as their own project.¹⁰

It was no coincidence that German émigrés were among the principal conduits for Weimar’s democratic language and theories. Prior to 1945, the Nazis had relentlessly suppressed or co-opted alternative cultural and intellectual traditions.¹¹ Some three hundred thousand Germans whom the Nazi regime defined as un-German or Judaic fled or were forced out of central Europe during the six years between the Nazi revolution in 1933 and the outbreak of war in 1939. The émigrés who fled Nazi oppression, however, carried with them a democratic language and institutional frameworks that the Third Reich could not reach. Of these exiles, a small fraction, fewer than fifteen thousand, returned to Europe after 1945 to take part in Germany’s reconstruction. Though these numbers may seem vanishingly small, returning émigrés profoundly contributed to the development of intellectual alternatives to disgraced Nazi ideology by invoking earlier theories of German democracy as a source of national renewal. While scholars have produced innumerable studies of German émigrés’ contributions to culture, music, journalism, medicine, and art during their exile, historians have only recently begun to explore the vital role that these individuals played in the postwar reconstruction of Europe. Through their agency, Weimar-era ideas returned to Germany and provided crucial building blocks for political stabilization.¹²

In addition to drawing attention to the crucial continuities driving Germany’s democratization, the stories of German émigrés demonstrate how different groups inside Germany came to think about democracy. Like all nations, Germany was never a homogeneous entity and comprised diverse communities—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, conservatives, liberals, and Socialists—that developed autonomous cultural, religious, and political traditions. Friedrich, Fraenkel, Gurian, Loewenstein, and Morgenthau were rooted in different political and cultural milieus. Each crafted a democratic theory that borrowed heavily from ideas and concepts unique to his background, and devoted considerable effort—both before and after the war—to mobilizing his own community in support of democratic politics. Each of these men therefore serves as a window for tracing the broader shifts that led Protestants and Catholics, Socialists and liberals, to understand and embrace democracy. They reflect the intellectual efforts, glaring lacunae, and disturbing political neglectfulness that enabled these broad transformations. Taken together, these stories show that there was no single foundation for West Germany’s postwar transformation. No one key idea, event, or group was the sole architect of postwar thought and politics. Rather, Germany’s reconstruction is best understood as the amalgamation of varied individual and collective transformations. It is only by observing these changes as a whole that one can fully understand Germany’s path to democratic norms and values.

German émigrés not only took part in Germany’s domestic transformation; they also helped steer West Germany’s broad international shift. In the years following the end of American occupation, West Germany unequivocally renounced its earlier quest for continental hegemony and instead became a staunch member of the Western alliance. Under the banner of Western integration, the West German government subordinated its military power to NATO, forged a firm alliance with the United States, and willingly compromised its sovereignty by hosting American military forces, abandoning the bellicose aspirations that had characterized German politics for decades. In the eyes of many Germans, including Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s chancellor from 1949 to 1963, this diplomatic reorientation transcended economic, security, or anti-Soviet considerations and was integral to the country’s domestic democratization. By participating in a broad transnational alliance, many believed, Germans would gain a new sense of national mission and would associate democracy with international prestige and security.¹³

German émigrés were paramount in this postwar reformation. Having lived in exile in the United States and participated in its war effort, these individuals blended an awareness of German culture with intimate knowledge of the American establishment. They acted as mediators between these two worlds and presented the American reconstruction and anti-Communist efforts in Europe in familiar terms, compatible with domestic traditions. By claiming that its alliance with the West stemmed from natural similarities between Germany and other nations, they helped moderate Germany’s intense nationalism and imperialism in favor of supranational commitments. Aware of the émigrés’ unique position, both the American authorities and the West German government actively encouraged them to expand their work in Germany. Through state institutions and private programs, the émigrés were regularly brought to Germany and placed in key educational and cultural centers. Émigrés often served as a connecting tissue, key actors that linked domestic democratization with the forging of the Western alliance. They stood at the center of the German-American symbiosis.

The stories of the German émigrés that form the core of this book thus trace two major and interdependent forces that drove Germany’s democratization: the convergence of German and American efforts and the resurrection of ideas and theories from the Weimar period. Their efforts do not provide a comprehensive or exhaustive account of Germany’s democratization. But their trajectories show how intellectual and institutional models from Weimar survived in exile and, through the enormous investment and pressures of the United States, returned to shape German political values, practices, and traditions for years to come.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF POSTWAR THOUGHT: THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC AND ITS DISCONTENTS

The revolution that rocked Germany in November 1918, ending World War I and leading to the foundation of Germany’s first democracy—the Weimar Republic—meant different things to different people. For the workers and soldiers who stormed state buildings in Berlin, Munich, and across Germany, it was a moment of hope after four miserable years of senseless war. Impeaching the German kaiser and establishing a republic, they believed, would smash the authority of the dominant Prussian nobility, bring political equality, and end the war. For conservatives and nationalists, on the other hand, the revolution marked Germany’s horrific downfall. The destruction of the monarchy, and Germany’s subsequent surrender to the Allies, was a humiliating end to a decades-long quest for world power and glory. For German intellectuals, the Weimar Republic raised as many questions as it answered. It inspired intense debates about the fundamentals of democratic politics, such as sources of political legitimacy, the role of welfare and religion, and the content of education in a democratic polity. For Carl J. Friedrich, Ernst Fraenkel, Waldemar Gurian, Karl Loewenstein, and Hans J. Morgenthau, the Weimar revolution—which one observer called one of the most memorable and dreadful [events] … in German history—and the political and intellectual debates it generated were the intellectual motors that drove their entire careers and ambitions.¹⁴

The creation of Germany’s first democracy was unanticipated, to say the least. Although strikes and anti-war demonstrations had proliferated throughout the increasingly unpopular war, no one expected them to morph into a revolution. The abysmal failure of the kaiser, the Prussian nobility, and the military to lead Germany to victory ignited a widespread sentiment that more power should be transferred to the parliament and elected politicians. Yet few called for the total abolition of the monarchy. Thus on 9 November 1918, when Socialist politician Philipp Scheidemann stood on the balcony of the Reichstag and proclaimed Germany to be a republic, he did so without any planning or consulting with his party. His declaration was merely an attempt to quiet angry demonstrators who demanded the kaiser’s resignation. But the revolution could not be stopped, as soldiers’ and workers’ riots swiftly spread across Germany. The kaiser and his family fled the country, and revolutionaries took over the state and declared an end to the war. Within a year, a coalition of Socialists, Catholics, and liberals had composed a new democratic constitution—the Weimar Constitution—in which authority stemmed from the people. During its fourteen years, the Weimar Republic opened up new democratic horizons by granting equal rights to women, establishing a comprehensive welfare state, and making all religions equal under the law. It undermined old ideas about the divine legitimacy and authority of the monarchy and aristocracy and allowed new political actors, including Jews, Socialists, and Catholics, to hold positions of power for the first time. Even those who opposed the republic recognized that it fundamentally broke with the past, and that Germany would never again revert to monarchy. Essayist René Schickele mused that November 1918 would remain unforgettable.¹⁵

At the same time, Weimar also inaugurated a decade of misery and anxiety that threatened to tear apart the German nation. In 1919 the victorious Allied Powers forced Germany to sign the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, which severed a massive amount of territory from Germany, obliged it to pay draconian reparations, and subjected its western regions to foreign allied occupation. Bedeviled by the treaty’s toxic legacy, Weimar revealed the hollow promises of four years of wartime sacrifice. For millions of Germans who, in the words of Erich Maria Remarque, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war, the republic never overcame these weaknesses.¹⁶ In the following years, Germans also experienced devastating economic disasters, such as hyperinflation, that destroyed the savings of millions. They also observed recurring attempts at violent coups and waves of political assassinations. The republic was plagued by the rise of revolutionary forces that sought to violently restructure society. On the left, the new Communist Party envisioned a Bolshevik dictatorship, which would abolish private property and dismantle democratic institutions. On the right, a burgeoning hypernationalist ideology prophesied a new racial order and renewed imperialist expansion. Both openly challenged the republic’s legitimacy and often resorted to violence in their attempt to overthrow it. The Germany of the Weimar era was more polarized, violent, and anxious than ever before. With its cocktail of utopian visions and deep anxieties, Weimar was the epitome of the age of extremes.¹⁷

Although Weimar was Germany’s first democracy, historians have long debated the depth of German democratic thought in this time period. Because Weimer generated such intense anger and frustration and collapsed in 1933 with little resistance, historians have often attributed Weimar’s catastrophic demise in part to the lack of a developed intellectual framework. The traumatic defeat in World War I and Weimar’s chronic instability, they claim, dealt a harsh blow to Germans’ faith in progress, peaceful political life, and liberal self-confidence. Liberal ideology and constitutional democracy seemed bankrupt and predicated on discredited convictions. According to this narrative, the intellectual energy generated by the disintegration of the monarchy and traditional authority contributed to innovations in aesthetics, literature, and philosophy but left German democracy intellectually crippled. As one scholar put it, German democracy’s downfall in 1933 was in part prepared by the demise of [liberalism’s] … cultural and intellectual forms after World War I.¹⁸

This interpretation of Weimar and its collapse, however, neglects the wide array of democratic theories, debates, and projects developed during the Weimar period. Despite what many scholars have argued, Weimar was not a democracy without democrats.¹⁹ Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, various intellectuals embarked on diverse campaigns to strengthen the fragile German republic’s intellectual foundations. In a stream of publications, the figures that stand at the center of this book offered new democratic theories and terminologies. Unlike previous thinkers, they did not merely call for modest reforms that would increase electoral participation. Instead, they argued that a democracy based on elected officials was the only truly legitimate political system.²⁰ These thinkers also sought to put their ideas into action by establishing a variety of educational organizations. In Heidelberg, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich, they founded and joined new educational centers for students and adults and cultural exchange programs, all aimed at strengthening and stabilizing the Weimar state. These efforts did not enter mainstream German thought in the 1920s, and most intellectuals and political theorists did not embrace them. Nevertheless, they constituted an important feature of the era’s intellectual landscape. No portrait of Weimar thought is complete without these attempts at democratization.²¹

These campaigns to bolster the republic were not abstract reflections, but responses to burning and concrete political questions. Each of these thinkers grappled as a young man with a key problem wrought by Germany’s democratic transition. How, for example, could Weimar produce a democratic elite in a country where business, political, and academic leaders had long supported the monarchy? What was the relationship between economic conditions and political rights, and was democracy obliged to spread wealth equally? What was religion’s role in the new democracy; was the separation of church and state strengthening or weakening Germany? How should Weimar treat those who called for its overthrow, such as Communists and extreme nationalists? And how should the young republic engage with the nations surrounding it, through cooperation or imperial competition? Each of these questions generated fierce debates among Germany’s thinkers and politicians. By trying to provide concrete answers, pro-democratic thinkers touched raw nerves in German political culture.

Friedrich, Fraenkel, Gurian, Loewenstein, and Morgenthau each focused on a different dilemma of democratic politics; their questions about democracy drew from their diverse political, religious, and intellectual backgrounds. Ultimately, however, they shared a fundamental agreement. In contrast to the claims of German nationalists, they all believed that democracy was not a foreign imposition, nor a legacy of weakness and humiliation. They feverishly sought to show that a division of power, electoral politics, and group participation in peaceful political competition stemmed from domestic German thought and traditions. The republic’s young defenders further argued that democracy did not divide the nation from within. The ultimate goal of politics was not national unity and homogeneity but vibrant competition between groups, parties, and associations. Democracy enabled a multitude of groups to live alongside one another and flourish in a pluralist environment. It allowed citizens to come together through mutual interests and joint political action and coalition building. While these ideas appear obvious to a twenty-first-century reader, they were profoundly innovative in Weimar’s intellectual landscape. Such theories introduced new thinking about politics, offering an intellectual arsenal that was unfamiliar to German readers.

This support for free political competition, however, was deeply limited by virulent anti-communism. Long before the Cold War, anxieties over Communist domination permeated German life, cutting across class, region, and political affiliation. The shocking success of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the subsequent emergence of militant Communist parties across Europe sparked widespread fears that Communists would soon take over the state, abolish private property, destroy traditional social hierarchies, and violently suppress religion. In the eyes of these five future émigrés, communism posed an overriding threat because it explicitly sought to destroy their visions of democracy. During the 1920s, German Communists openly opposed elections and the division of power, lambasting them as veils for capitalist exploitation. These five men therefore conceived of democracy as continually subject to domestic and foreign threats. Democratic institutions required constant mobilization and innovative defense mechanisms to combat potential Communist aggression and subversion. For this generation, anti-communism and democracy were thus deeply intertwined. Their hostility to communism underpinned a comprehensive democratic project.²²

These ideas and experiences continued to guide the work of these five men decades after Weimar’s collapse. And the central role that these émigrés and their ideas played in Germany’s democratization after World War II thus necessitates a fresh assessment of the legacies of the Weimar Republic, both its liberating and its limiting effects. Scholars have frequently noted how Germany’s first democracy served as a negative model for post–World War II attempts to revive German thought and democratic politics. Haunted by the memory of its collapse, German intellectuals, journalists, and politicians developed a Weimar complex or Weimar syndrome, namely, an obsessive need to juxtapose and contrast current goals and actions with the 1920s. Indeed, throughout the 1950s, the catchphrase Bonn is not Weimar appeared not only in books and articles but also in political slogans and election campaigns.²³ Weimar, however, also offered positive models, theories, and terminology. Despite its weaknesses, many of the architects of postwar democracy regarded the republic as an unfinished yet admirable venture. Because of Weimar’s tainted reputation, the intellectual architects of the postwar order rarely commented on the origins of their democratic thought. They often presented old ideas as new and fresh. But Weimar was not merely a cautionary tale. It generated long-lasting models for postwar thought and was an incubator of democratic theory.

At the same time, these émigrés also carried close and long-standing ties between democracy and anti-communism with them when they returned to Germany. This connection explains not only the profound hopes invested in democratic possibilities but also the limits and ironies of Germany’s postwar reconstruction. Against a Europe increasingly divided along ideological lines, this generation reintroduced to the postwar era a highly combative and dichotomous conception of democratic politics: one was either democracy’s friend or its mortal enemy. As a result, the figures at the center of this book anxiously sought to delegitimize and suppress ideas that challenged their own. They deemed anyone who doubted whether the West German state should persecute Communists or bind itself to the Cold War Western alliance an anti-democratic agent, to be stripped of the right of legitimate democratic participation. This profound inflexibility meant that Weimar democratic ideas constrained the postwar political imagination just as much as they enabled it. Their liberating effect was profoundly diminished by their rigid nature.

Moreover, in a disturbing irony of postwar culture, these agents of democracy rarely recognized how their zeal for anti-communism perpetuated elements of Nazi thought. The hatred of communism was one of the Nazis’ central ideological foundations, a profound source of their legitimacy and popularity. The fierce anti-Semitism of Hitler and his followers was partially fueled by the perverse conviction that Jews were the cunning vanguard of a global